Study: Enterprise search is lame

It may be the Google era on the Internet, but when it comes to finding company information that employees need to do their jobs, it's barely even the CompuServe era.

That, more or less, is what research firm AIIM found in a study that surveyed more than 500 businesses in May about the "findability" of information.

In the study, 49 percent agreed that it's hard to find information they need, and 69 percent said less than half of their employer's information is searchable online.

Enterprise search technology is widely available, so the issue lies more with corporate priorities than with the state of the art, AIIM said in the study, announced Tuesday.

AIIM's study showed that it's hard for people to find the information they need for their job.

(Credit: AIIM)

[The_Shed]

It's not just finding the information that's difficult. Undoubtedly once you find it you won't be able to access it because the security models inside the Enterprise are so flawed. FOne SharePoint site we have is fully searchable and you can find stuff easily but there's 228 access control groups for just over 500 people.

If you are really going to put information into the hands of employees then you're going to need to sort out access control as well as searching.

[dankeldsen]

Stephen - thanks for the coverage, and "The_Shed" I absolutely agree. Security is almost inevitably made too complex for the actual BUSINESS NEEDS they are meant to support. (I'm a [mostly] reformed paranoid IT security guy, so I've been both part of the problem and part of the solution)

Less is more people! Throwing up barriers will often prevent people from getting work done, and the complex overlaps between access mechanics only confuses EVERYBODY.

Search/Findability isn't as simple as everyone would like to think, and neither is content management.

Aligning the two, and making sure that useful security policies aren't violated by your enterprise search engines, is something that people don't appreciate until it goes horribly wrong.

More coming up next week in our free public webinar (see http://www.aiim.org/Events/register.aspx?id=179 ), and the Market IQ on Findability coming out mid-July, with our entire set of findings on Findability.